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Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Political bullshit with numbers is making it ever harder to make good decisions

If governments want to make good decisions they have to have reliable data about what is happening. But they increasingly don't use numbers that way. Instead of using data for insight they use it for bullshit and undermine the evidence they need to make a difference to anything.

So the NHS is having a winter crisis. This year instead of the service responding in a panic when the unpredictable event of winter occured, the panic response was, apparently, planned. Apparently, this is good, our lords and masters said so.

But there is a little vignette that occured in Parliament that illustrates a great deal about why we have such problems and even more about the reasons why we currently look like a kakistocracy. It relates to the statistics about bed occupancy in hospitals and illustrates something profoundly disturbing about how politicians handle statistics and use numbers.

The background to the story is that the government has now mandated daily statistics about "winter pressures" in the NHS. That might not be a bad thing in itself if the point were to make management decisions in response to the numbers (though this supposes an ability to know what response to make and to interpret the numbers correctly: neither are obviously true).

One of those statistics is bed occupancy. This isn't a very useful statistic (as I've argued before) but collecting it daily is much better than weekly or monthly which is what is done for the rest of the year.

The government (and many others) have set a "target" level of occupancy for beds to ensure there are enough free beds each day to cope with demand. That target says no more than 85% of beds should be occupied.

So far so good. But the annoying doctors and opposition insist we are in the middle of a crisis in bed availability and keep complaining. In response to one of those complaints and in explaining the impact of his winter plan Jeremy Hunt said this in the House of Commons:

The shadow Health Secretary told The Independent: “It is completely unacceptable that the 85% bed occupancy target…has been missed”. What was bed occupancy on Christmas eve? It was 84.2%, so this had a real impact.

To put his claim in context, here is the chart of daily occupancy to early january (from the latest data I could get from NHS England). Shading identifies complete weeks:

Which number did Jeremy Hunt repeat? The least representative number on the chart and the only day in the whole of winter where the target was met. He also ignored the longer term context. The days near christmas have the lowest occupancy of the whole year and, historically, have often been in the 60% range.

Now maybe he was just having a bad day and didn't mean to quote something so irrelevant to the current problems with beds. But another minister said this two days earlier when challenged with a similar complaint in the Lords:

The noble Baroness talked about bed occupancy. Of course, we know that high levels of bed occupancy are a concern. Bed occupancy was below the target of 85% going into this period—on Christmas Eve it was 84.2%

I think we can conclude that this number has been shared around the government as the one to quote to deflect any complaints about the state of the NHS at winter.

Sure politicians have to win debates and this will, inevitably, involve some spin. But the way this number was brought up goes beyond reasonable spin and becomes what Frankfurt would describe as bullshit:

[the bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

What this case illustrates is a deeply troubling view about how politicians treat statistics. They do not look to them as a source of useful information they can use to make decisions. They trawl them for any number that supports the argument they are trying to make, regardless of meaning or context. In doing this they utterly devalue their use in decision making or management.

There is an alternative explanation that is slightly less pejorative: perhaps they are so statistically illiterate they don't understand the numbers or the context. Unfortunately it isn't obvious that this explanation bodes any more optimism about the how well the country is run.

I tell this story as an illustration of a very widespread and pervasive phenomenon in modern politics. It isn't just the government, they are all at it, opposition and minor parties included. There seems to be no drive to take the effort to analyse problems before deciding key policies or actions. The process now seems to be to identify some actions or policies likely to play well in newspaper headlines or with supporters. Only then, after the key decisions are made, does anyone look at the evidence and then only to wrench some number, no matter how out of context or irrelevant, that supports their view. Even when the number is rebutterd by the highest statistical authority in the land, they will often continue to quote it (as Boris has just done with the legendarily bad £350m/week goes to the EU). Truth and context are irrelevant: all that matters is winning the argument.

This is no way to run a government. We need people in government and opposition who are competent, honest and who are prepared to do the hard work of analysis before making arguments or deciding policies. If we don't get them, and get them soon, the bullshit will overwhelm our ability to make any good decisions about anything in public policy.

About Me

I'm a data scientist and I used to be a management consultant. This is where I rant about the things that are irrelevant to my job or which are relevant but my employer might not want me to say. Perhaps because I want to swear too much.